Republicans are questioning socialist candidate Francesca Hong‘s Tuesday night loss in Wisconsin‘s Democratic gubernatorial primary, with one GOP congressman labeling the election stolen.
Milwaukee Election Commission executive director Paulina Gutierrez said that a “human error” occurred during the downloading of absentee ballots, which delayed the official results until well into Wednesday morning.
Gutierrez said at a press conference just after midnight that five of the nine USB drives cataloging votes had accidentally downloaded the “audit log” and “not the results,” prompting election officials to return to the operations center and redownload the results for the five USB drives in question.
“It’s a human error, and these things can happen,” she stated.
But the mistake caused an uproar in conservative circles on social media.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), who represents one of the most competitive districts in the country in western Wisconsin, wrote on X Wednesday morning that “the democrat establishment stole the election from Hong.”
“Every day Democrats have no choice in who they vote for,” continued Van Orden, a close ally of President Donald Trump and an avowed election security skeptic. “The sooner they realize this, the sooner they realize that they’re being used.”
Hong was seen by many Republicans as a weaker candidate than Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, and some conservatives floated the idea of voting in the Democratic primary to boost her, an idea Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), the GOP gubernatorial nominee, roundly rejected.
And while progressive voices have yet to claim that the process to amend the USB drive errors amounts to any level of election fraud, a number of other conservative voices began to cry foul over the error.
Martin Walsh, editor-in-chief of the Conservative Brief, claimed that “socialists [sounded] off” in response to Gutierrez’s press conference.
“Officials then ‘fixed’ the data and uploaded the results,” he wrote on X.
Teri Christoph published a column on Red State Wednesday morning discussing “the curious case of five USB sticks.”
“How did five out of nine of the USB sticks leave the election facility without the correct results and files?” she wrote. “Here’s a second question: maybe we should just use paper ballots? Digital technology doesn’t seem to be doing our election system any favors.”
Some took the opportunity to call on senators to pass the SAVE America Act, a voter ID and election integrity bill that remains held up in the Senate, even as Trump repeatedly calls on them to do so.
Alex Bruesewitz, a GOP strategist who advises the White House, wrote on social media that the mishap “is yet another reason the Senate needs to pass the SAVE America Act as soon as possible.”
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson shared a clip claiming that NBC News’ election analyst Steve Kornacki was left “speechless” after “finding out 5 USB sticks in Milwaukee were MISSING RESULTS.”
Hong’s loss marks a significant setback for progressives following a series of impressive wins against establishment Democrats, most recently Abdul el Sayed‘s victory over Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate last week.
A member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Hong had polled ahead of Crowley by double-digits heading into the primary, but eventually lost by just 4,000 votes once the vote count was finalized Wednesday morning.
Hong did not publicly comment on the USB errors during her concession speech.
The White House also declined to comment Wednesday morning, despite Trump’s steady focus on election integrity issues.